jumping back in

I'm just going to jump back into posting here. I've been wanting to for months now but feeling like I need to catch up to the last 8 months or however long it's been since I stopped posting. Since I know that's never going to happen I need to just start where we are right now.

So, here are the boys in a picture I took earlier this week. Our leaves finally started turning - odd to have the peak color of autumn happening in mid-November instead of October. Gavin is 3 1/2 now and Dermot is 10 1/2 months. They're both so much fun and amaze us on a daily basis, many times a day. We get a big kick out of how they play together. They sit and laugh at each other, and crawl around and chase each other.

This evening Gavin and I were playing in the front room, drawing with crayons. I had written the word OFF, and Gavin started to write the word too, copying the letters. He got frustrated that his writing was running into other lines on the page, so I wrote the word on a clean piece of paper and handed it to him. I said, there now you can copy it. So he picked up the paper, walked over to the end table and slid the paper under the table while making machine noises, then brought it back to me. There, he said, there's your copy. Huh... that isn't what I meant by copy!

Dermot is starting to copy things too, although not in Gavin's interpretation of the word. He's mimicking sounds that we make, saying "uh-oh" and copying other random noises we make. It sometimes turns into a game where he makes a noise and we mimic him, then he mimics back. He and Jason invented another game today, where they pass a ball back and forth into each other's hands.

We had a really nice Thanksgiving. We hosted at our house this year and had my sister and her family, and Jason's mom and sisters and Anita's new baby Logan over for dinner, and were joined by my other sister and her family and my mom. It was a much smaller group than we usually share Thanksgiving with, but it was the perfect number of people for our house. I like our house, but it isn't designed to hold large groups of people.

Gavin started preschool about 5 weeks ago. I had given up hope that he'd get into the school we applied for, the only one we applied to, since they started classes in September and we hadn't gotten a call from them. And yet, a month after classes started I came home to find a message from the school office manager that a spot had opened up for Gavin. I was so thrilled! We started the very next Monday. It is a wonderful school, and even after just 5 weeks has been amazing for Gavin. I am so thankful that we got in.

I need to go now but I promise I'll try to write again sooner than 8 months from now!